Pronto, Mojo and More Rising

Rafi Adar's Pronto restaurant will open to the public next month in its new location at the terminus of Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv. The restaurant's chef will be David Frankel, who recently completed a long training stint at Rene Redzepi's Noma Restaurant in Copenhagen, which has two Michelin stars. Before that Frankel worked for a long period at another two-star restaurant, Mugaritz in San Sebastian, Spain, where he ran the fish section. The position at Pronto is his first as a chef in an Israeli kitchen.

In the past two weeks two eateries under one ownership have opened not far from each other: The Ben-Gurion Pizzeria on Ben-Gurion Street at the corner of Graetz Street and a Tel Aviv branch of the Asiatic Mojo Restaurant at 86 Hahashmonaim Street; the mother Mojo has been operating for three years now in Netanya.

Both places are owned by a group of developers including Amir Avidar, Sagi Razumovich and Nadav Tzur, in collaboration with the pizzeria chef Guy Feldman and chef Leon Alkalay and Oren Goldwasser of Mojo. In the past the latter two developed for the group menu items like an Asian hamburger and Thai dishes from local ingredients. The pizza at Ben-Gurion is baked twice - before the sauces and toppings are added, and after.

This week saw the closing of the Violet restaurant at Moshav Udim, where chef Yossi Sheetrit cooked during the course of five years. According to Sheetrit, the decision to close came in the wake of licensing difficulties. On Monday a farewell meal was held there.

Another restaurant that has shut its doors is chef and caterer Shmil Holland's Shmil at the Lab, which operated in the Lab Theater compound in Jerusalem. High-tech entrepreneur Erel Marganit, who invested in the coffee bar, also maintains a performance stage and animation company there. Holland will soon be publishing a book on Eastern European Jewish cooking, edited by Gil Hovav.

Baker Uri Shefet of Lehamim has uploaded to YouTube a series of eight videos explaining the principles of baking for eight items, among them Gouda rolls, focaccia, chocolate rolls and olive bread. After his book "Lehem Babayit" ("Bread at home" ) was published, Shefet has chosen not to publish a sequel but rather to take a collaborative approach and upload videos to the Internet.

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